Back in October of 2019, I was formally given an offer to take a step into a management role for the first time. I’d previously had decent exposure in leadership roles, but it was always from a delivery or technology perspective, and while I’d participated in everything from restructure planning to performance management, I’d never been the person responsible for it. This wasn’t the first time I’d been motioned to move into such a role - previous employers had hinted and asked about my aspirations on a few occasions, but for me the answer had always been a simple no when I saw my own leaders spending time on red tape, bureaucracy, and dealing with what I saw as ineffective senior leadership. This opportunity I saw as different; a much smaller company, technology being at the heart of the business, and a supportive senior leadership team who would treat you as a peer rather than “someone from IT”. After a lot of thinking, and a number of promises to myself that I wouldn’t become ‘the other’ that once upon a time I’d railed so hard against, I decided I’d give it a shot.
Straight off the bat I purchased a number of leadership books to help me prepare better. All the normal stuff - Brene Brown, Simon Sinek, etc. But the first book that I read was actually “Making of a Manager”, by Facebook’s Julie Zhou. Now, with the benefit of some time to reflect on my first twelve months in the job, I can recap not only on my own lessons learned, but how some of the advice provided by Zhou bore out at the end of the day.
Starting Off
In the first two chapters of her book, Zhou outlines both the role of a manager - to get great outcomes from a group of people who work together - and what to expect from the first few months in the job. She outlines a number of potential paradigms that may exist for your role, whether you’re responsible for setting up an entirely new business unit or stepping into the shoes of someone who’s just departed. The scenario that captured my own experience, “The Successor”, reflected the case where I was taking over from my old boss. The particular call-outs Zhou mentioned in this case were:
- The awkwardness of establishing a new dynamic with former peers
- A potentially overwhelming increase in responsibility
- Feeling pressure to do things exactly like your former manager
For me, item 2 was definitely the hardest to deal with. The business was going through an incredible period of growth, and whereas my predecessor had been running a team of roughly 20 people, over a period of 12 months I was managing - and still trying to grow - a team of up to 40. Because of the dramatic differences in our responsibilities and goals, I never did feel the pressure to try and be like my former boss. This made it easier when sitting down with my former peers and discussing things with them, because I made it clear that I wasn’t going to have the scope to be as technically deep as my predecessor, and I would give them autonomy to drive technical decisions and delivery with my support, while I concentrated on bringing in new people to complement the team. Largely, this brought about a positive reaction, and the only ‘successor syndrome’ challenges I had was more managing the expectations of people above me as to what I was targeting vs. what my former boss had done. By the time the end of this year rolled around however, I was more than happy that we were growing the management team and I was going to be able to share the load - I had definitely started falling into the trap of trying to do everything really well, with a workslate of responsibilities that was simply too big.
A Full Calendar
A lot of people think that management is just endless terrible meetings, and this is part of the reason they shy away from it. It’s definitely true that your calendar will get a lot busier - but it’s also incredibly important that you make the most of those sessions and don’t become buried in ‘busywork’. A case in point of what I think makes a terrible meeting, and a poor manager/leader - I once attended a risk review meeting whereby we were responsible for looking over progress made towards mitigating technology risks in the last quarter. As a technical lead, I came well prepared with what changes we’d delivered to put ourselves in a positive position, as well as a new risk I’d identified in a poorly understood part of our tech stack. The manager who chaired the meeting however had a different take - they opened the meeting by saying they wanted to ensure we all got out of here as quickly as possible and got time back in our calendar, so if it was fine with us could we just tick the boxes we needed to and move on?
If you’re going to have a calendar full of meetings, you need to at least ensure that they’re all worthwhile. People need to be prepared, have a clear idea of what’s to be discussed, and be able to measure if the meeting was successful or not. Terrible meetings have frustrated me for a long time, and it’s clear that Zhou wants us to be as lean and effective as possible with them, devoting the entirety of chapter six as to how to make this happen. In her mind, for a meeting to be effective it needs to accomplish one of the following outcomes;
- Making a decision
- Sharing information
- Providing feedback
- Generating ideas
- Strengthening relationships
To make this happen, you need to ensure that you’ve got the right people in the room, they’ve had a chance to come prepared, and there’s a notion of psychological safety so that people can share their thoughts and/or opinions as needed. Finally she leaves us with the note that some meetings don’t need you, and others don’t need to exist at all; a lesson many organisations need to take to heart if they want their teams to be happier and more productive! In terms of my own experience, I have culled or changed a number of meetings in an effort to make them more effective; or laid down ground rules around needing someone to facilitate and lead to an agenda. Not everything has worked, but certain things - such as devoting a Wednesday to work from home and dedicate 1:1 time to my remote hires or potential new CV scanning - have worked very well for all parties.
Hiring Great People
Another topic that garners an entire chapter of its own (and then some) is the topic of hiring good people to make your team even more effective. Zhou states;
“As a manager, one of the smartest ways to multiply your team’s impact is to hire the best people and empower them to do more and more until you stretch the limits of their capabilities”
Probably two months after taking the job I was tasked with undertaking a large uplift of our team, and spending a lot of time talking to recruiters (definitely not something I’d previously have wanted to do) and interviewing people (which by comparison I’ve always largely enjoyed). I really do agree with Zhou that one of the single most important roles of any manager is to get and keep great people; and constantly reviewing and refining how you do this is definitely part of the challenge.
For me, one bias I’ve had to overcome is the concept of up-front tech screens for candidates. I’ve personally always hated them - missing a couple of jobs I would have done great in because I couldn’t answer some arbitrary technical question about algorithmic performance of some incredibly abstract concept not rooted in any technical reality I’d ever deal with. Yet after listening to some interesting talks about how they can be useful, and attempting to single-handedly deal with a large pipeline of candidates without the support of a full management team (or HR department for that matter) I’ve definitely come around to using them.
For me, the sweet spot for a tech screen is when;
- You’re mass hiring and don’t have the resources/support to bring every candidate in for a day’s work or extended process
- The screen is somehow rooted in reality, something that the candidate would largely be expected to do, rather than solving ‘academic exercise X’.
Having overcome this personal bias and coming up with a process I was largely happy with, I found that I could concentrate on enjoying the interviews with the people I knew would be worth my time, and ensuring that the net was cast wide enough to bring in candidates that previously may not have been included in my workplaces’ hiring runs due to other pre-existing biases in the process. On reflection, things have gone well - I’ve had a minimal amount of people leave or be lost during probation, and everyone we’ve added has added value to the team, with a couple of true gems being uncovered along the way and an increasing number of diverse hires. No process is ever perfect, and we’ll always need to consider how we improve, but this is one area that I can definitely look back on with some pride after twelve months in the job.
Nurturing Culture
Culture is hard. Like, really hard. For me, this is something that has prompted me to think about the criticism I’ve levelled at some former leaders of mine in the past, whereby I thought that they as a collective weren’t doing enough to nurture a great culture. I can still reflect on times that specifically the wrong thing was done (see the risk review example earlier) but my biggest learning has been that it’s much more difficult to judge the right thing to do a lot of the time.
Zhou talks about culture in three steps;
- Know the kind of team you want to be a part of
- Never stop talking about what’s important, and always walk the walk
- Create the right rituals and incentives
Personally, I tried tackling this by talking to my leads and workshopping the kind of principles we wanted the wider team to live by. Largely this was so we had a broader, high-level framework that we could build our values and cultures on top of, and was largely done because we had quite a fragmented culture that had been made up of teams from a couple of different acquisitions. At the time I felt I was speaking to the principles enough, but in hindsight I realise I definitely could have talked to them more - and more importantly, I should have ensured all my leads were doing the same thing as part of their own day-to-day work. In this respect, I probably fell into one of the traps that Zhou talks about in her book, where I didn’t delegate enough and tried to do too much off my own back.
Now that we have a dedicated Engineering leadership team set up within the organisation, I feel like this is something that can be tackled with renewed vigour, and stands a better chance of being embedded throughout the whole team. One thing I’ve been deeply grateful of in the past twelve months though is a chance to get to know each of my team a little better, and to be able to talk to them in terms that matter to them about what’s important to us as an organisation. I feel like this is something that definitely gets missed at a lot of companies - here’s a slogan, some mantra, kick it over the fence and walk away and hope everything just works. Yeah… no thanks.
We all feel like an imposter sometimes
During a 1:1 with one of my tech leads earlier in the year, they spoke to me about how they thought they were going relative to some of their peers; stating that when they looked around at the other tech leads or some of the work I was doing in my old role before taking the management job, they felt they were coming up short in a lot of areas, and weren’t really sure if they were doing the right thing. To be honest, I had to stifle a bit of a laugh at the time - I had literally spent the entire week feeling much the same way about the work I’d been doing, only to be told at the start of the meeting by this very person that I was doing great!
The reality is - and Zhou stresses this in her book - everyone feels like an imposter at some stage. There’s not even a guarantee that once you overcome it in your current role, you won’t be feeling it again a few weeks or months later. I spent probably a good 4-6 months of my initial 12 month stint feeling this way, and it wasn’t necessarily all at the start, either. Every time you tackle something new that you’re unsure about, there’s always the temptation to feel a little panic inside and give into this idea that, to quote many a football chant, “you don’t know what you’re doing”. The first lesson Zhou has to impart around this is that anyone who cares about doing a good job is always on a journey of growth to get better at what they do;
“In another ten years, I know I’ll look back and realize that the path I’m on today is still squiggly. There is much left to learn, and I am far from being the manager I aspire to be… But with time, will, and a growth mindset, the lessons ahead are right there for my taking.”
The other thing that I’ve learned is critical to achieving this is feedback - good, well-structured or truly meaningful feedback. While telling someone they’ve done a good job is always advisable (if indeed they have) it’s important to go beyond this and point out specifically the things that you appreciate to really make them take that feedback to heart. The “shit sandwich” is over-used, but there’s definitely credence to the idea that if you provide meaningful positive feedback, people will be more open to suggestions on the areas they still need to tune. Truly meaningful feedback also doesn’t have to be given in a formal setting; personally, the best feedback I received all year came at our Christmas party, over a drink with a workmate, who told me how much he’d appreciated everything he saw me as doing for the team over the course of the year. It was probably two sentences tops, there were no references to performance goals or values statements, but in contrast to the stressful weeks I’d endured in the lead up to end of year, it was a rallying cry to my spirits to make me feel that I was doing the right things and I was capable of doing this job well.
The Water Carrier
To wrap, I’ve come out of the first 12 months of my management life with a much firmer idea of where my strengths lie. Zhou’s book, while it does show a strong slant towards Facebook-centric cultural practices (and I must say, my opinion of Facebook as an organisation and product doesn’t help in that regard) definitely helped lay the foundation for what I should be prepared for and where I should be focusing my energy. It’s definitely worth a read for anyone entering into the role for the first time.
For me, I view my role as very much the “water carrier” of a football team; the defensive midfielder who is absolutely not the star technical player in the team, or the creative genius - but rather, whose job is to do a lot of heavy lifting and analysis of the wider flow of the game in order to make their teammates shine. While everyone needs feedback, and we all need some recognition when we do a good job, I don’t wish to be the Silicon Valley style entrepreneur or global tech guru that others may wish to be. For me, the satisfaction comes from making my people and teams work well - and delivering those great outcomes while having a good time.
I still don’t know if this is something I could do in a different environment - I feel a large part of the work I’ve been able to do is down to the healthy amount of autonomy and trust provided by senior leadership in my current organisation, and a very lean way of doing traditionally quite bureaucratic managerial tasks like performance reviews or HR discussions. But I’ve definitely found a niche that I’m comfortable working within, and a greater appreciation for the work that those good managers I’ve had in the past have done - it’s definitely not as easy as it looks, and ‘debugging’ people requires a lot more training and time invested than debugging even the most archaic of code.